This repository contains the underlying code for the BiologyPhDStipends Shiny application hosted at rhettrautsaw.app/shiny/BiologyPhDStipends/.

In April 2022, I started to collect US-based Biology Ph.D. Stipends. Originally, my goal was to advocate for a living-wage for graduate students in the Department of Biology at the University of Florida. After feedback from others, Rhett and I decided to build this Shiny App. We hope this dataset will help others advocate for a living wage. This is our cleaned repository, many iterates of the Shiny app have existed and 146 prior commits.

Shiny apps are expensive to host, if you find this resource useful, please consider donating here to help us keep this resource alive!

Shiny apps load very slow! Instead of adding additional plots to the app, we added some plots here.

I wanted to know how the US News National University Rankings (compiled by Andrew G. Reiter) compared to the salaries given to Biology PhD students.

Figure 1. Salary to Living Wage Ratio for Biology PhD assistantships compared to the 2023 US News National University Rankings. Shape of the points indicate if the University is public (circle) or private (triangle). The star indicates the Department of Biology at the University of Florida. This data was sampled on 11/30/2022.

NSF conducts a Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering every year - I'm slowly exploring the insight the 2020 survey data provides.

Figure 2: Salary to Living Wage Ratio for Biology PhD assistantships and the programs racial composition for full-time doctoral students (as reported by NSF's 2020 survey). Here we use NSF's coding, where Indian is equal to American Indian or Alaska Native and Pacific is equal to Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. This data was sampled on 11/30/2022..

Figure 3. Salary to Living Wage Ratio for Biology PhD assistantships compared to the 2023 US News National University Rankings. Shape of the points indicate if the University is public (circle) or private (triangle). Size indicates the size of the program based on the 2020 NSF Survey of Graduate Students and Postdoctorates in Science and Engineering. The star indicates the Department of Biology at the University of Florida. This data was sampled on 11/30/2022..

We keep a list on our app of other recent efforts to collect graduate student's salary data in the United States. Here is a subset:

• Medicine and Public Health - Teachers & Researchers United, Johns Hopkins University
• English PhD Stipends in the United States
• Entomology Graduate Stipends - Kirchner & Petzoldt
• Computer Science PhD Stipends - Jeff Huang
• Verified University Minimum Stipends - University of California Strike - Liza Wood
• Psychology Internship Stipends - Hood et al. 2022
• Physics Graduate Student Pay - Shinbrough & Acres, American Physical Society.

• MIT Graduate Student Cost of Living - MIT Graduate Student Council